THE WHITE HOUSE
OFFICE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: 202/456-7035
December 21, 1993
Remarks
by
Vice President Al Gore
at
National Press Club
December 21, 1993

Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. I still have
jet lag, though -- nature's way of making you look like your
passport photo.

I'm happy to be home. And I'm particularly happy to be
talking about telecommunications to people whose lives will be
shaped by the changes ahead for us.

I'm pleased to announce today that at the beginning of the
year, President Clinton will present to Congress a package of
legislative and administrative proposals on telecommunications.
Today, I want to talk about the future we envision.

But I'd like to start by talking about an incident from the
past.

There is a lot of romance surrounding the sinking of the
Titanic 91 years ago. But when you strip the romance away, a
tragic story emerges that tells us a lot about human beings --
and telecommunications.

Why did the ship that couldn't be sunk steam full speed into
an ice field? For in the last few hours before the Titanic
collided, other ships were sending messages like this one from
the Mesaba: "Lat42N to 41.25 Long 49W to Long 50.30W. Saw much
heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs also field ice."

And why, when the Titanic operators sent distress signal
after distress signal did so few ships respond?

The answer is that -- as the investigations proved -- the
wireless business then was just that, a business. Operators had
no obligation to remain on duty. They were to do what was
profitable. When the day's work was done -- often the lucrative
transmissions from wealthy passengers -- operators shut off their
sets and went to sleep. In fact, when the last ice warnings were
sent, the Titanic operators were too involved sending those
private messages from wealthy passengers to take them. And when
they sent the distress signals operators on the other ships were
in bed.

Distress signals couldn't be heard, in other words, because
the airwaves were chaos -- willy-nilly transmissions without
regulation.

The Titanic wound up two miles under the surface of the
North Atlantic in part because people hadn't realized that radio
was not just a curiosity but a way to save lives.

Ironically, that tragedy that resulted in the first efforts
to regulate the airwaves.

Why did government get involved? Because there are certain
public needs that outweigh private interests.

Today, as divers explore the hulk of the Titanic, we face a
similar problem. A new world awaits us. It is one that can not
only save lives but utterly change and enrich them. And we need
to rethink the role of government once more.

How do we balance private needs and public interests?
It's important in discussing the information age that we
discuss not merely technology, but communications. Because from
communications comes community. Not long ago, when travel was
very difficult, communities were small and communication was
personal and direct. It was between families, neighbors, business
partners.

Then the means of travel improved, moving us all away from
each other, and making communication more difficult.
Until recently, if an immigrant came to the United States,
whether from Russia, or China, or England, it meant saying
goodbye to one's parents and never having a conversation with
them again.

But these days, technology has brought us closer together.
I read a little while ago of a family scattered all over the
world. More than a hundred different members keep in touch
through the Internet. They keep people informed of births and
deaths and graduations. Children in more than half a dozen
countries feel like they know each other -- even though they've
never met.

It is important in focusing on what's ahead in
communications, to zero in not on the technology, but what we use
technology for.

No one says "Let's use the telephone. " They say, Let's
call Grandma."

We havn't always kept that in mind.

When the telephone was invented, stockbrokers in London said
"Who needs so many telephones, we have messenger boys."

It didn't take long to see that there were some things
messenger boys couldn't do -- transmit both ends of a
conversation, for example. We figured out new uses each time the
telephone changed, from big wooden boxes on the wall, to desk
phones, to ones with long cords ... to the car phones and cell
phones that allow us to talk while we drive or walk.

We will do this again with the changes in store over the
next decade -- one of the biggest changes the human species has
ever faced.

Most people today are primarily receivers of information.
We watch TV. We listen to radio.

In this decade we will transmit more and more as well.

We'll send and receive, not just on the telephone but across
the full range of the new technologies. We'll turn from
consumers into providers.

In a way, this change represents a kind of empowerment. The
quality revolution in the factory treats each individual as a
source of added value. The communications revolution recognizes
each individual as a source of information that adds value to our
community and to our economy.

After all, interactive TV doesn't just mean yelling at the
television when the referee makes a bad call. It means holding a
business meeting without leaving your living room.

It means that people at home can use their television not
just as entertainment but as an active tool.

These changes have neither come overnight or out of the
blue. Rather, they are the outgrowth of a steady series of
changes encompassing much of our history.

It used to be that nations were more or less successful in
their competition with other nations depending upon the kind of
transportation infrastructure they had. Nations with deep water
ports did better than nations unable to exploit the technology of
ocean transportation. After World War II, when tens of millions
of American families bought automobiles, we found our network of
two-lane highways completely inadequate. We built a network of
interstate highways. And that contributed enormously to our
economic dominance around the world.

Today, commerce rolls not just on asphalt highways but along
information highways. And tens of millions of American families
and businesses now use computers and find that the 2-lane
information pathways built for telephone service are no longer
adequate.

It is not that we have a shortage of information. Indeed we
often find now that we have a lot more than we know what to do
with.

John Stuart Mill, who lived through much of the 19th Century
was said to be the last man who knew everything. Since his time,
no matter what your field, you have to resign yourself to the
fact that a great deal will take place completely outside your
awareness.

Take the Landsat example. We're trying to understand the
global environment, and the Landsat satellite is capable of
taking a complete photograph of the entire Earth's surface every
two weeks. It's been doing that for almost 20 years.

In spite of the great need for that information, 95% of
those images have never fired a single neuron in a single human
brain. Instead, they are stored in electronic silos of data.

We used to have an agricultural policy where we stored grain
in Midwestern silos and let it rot while millions of people
starved to death. We now have an insatiable hunger for
knowledge. And the data sits rotting away -- sometimes literally
rotting by remaining unused.

Why?

Part of the problem has to do with the way information is
configured and presented. Someone once said that if we tried
to describe the human brain in computer terms, it looks as if we
have a low bit rate, but very high resolution. For example, the
telephone company decided a few years ago that seven numbers were
the most that we could remember. That's a low bit-rate. Then
they added three.

On the other hand, we can absorb billions of bits of
information instantly if they are arrayed in a recognizable
pattern within which each is related to all the others -- a human
face, or a galaxy of stars.

In order to communicate richly detailed images that allow us
to comprehend large volumes of data, we need to combine two
technologies. Computers have an ever-growing ability to
transform data into recognizable images. And we are making
greater use of them every year.

But to communicate these images among ourselves, we need
networks capable of carrying those images to every house and
business. We know how to do that technologically, but we have to
unscramble the legal, regulatory and financial problems that have
thus far threatened our ability to complete such a network.

In the few places where this capacity now exists we are
already using them to communicate in ways that enrich and even
save our lives.

We use it with Matthew Meredith, a six year old boy who
recently underwent a bone marrow transplant. His doctors
recommended that he shouldn't begin his classes at Randolph
Elementary School in Topeka. So the school and local telephone
company teamed up to bring first grade to him through two-way
video services and a television camera.

Matthew was able to take part in class. He used a fax to
hand in class assignments. And the kids in his class got a
glimpse of videoconferencing technology that will be common in a
few years.

In West Virginia, doctors are using the Mountaineer Doctor
Television Project to link to specialists at West Virginia
University. A while back, for example, two-month-old Zachary
Buchanan had an irregular heartbeat. Using the network, his
family doctor sent an image of his heart to a pediatric
cardiologist 100 miles away. His diagnosis: the condition wasn't
serious -- and he didn't have to travel halfway across the state
for treatment.

All of these applications enhance the quality of life.
Because they do, they will spur economic growth.

After all, even the quickest glance at the
telecommunications sector of the economy shows what it means for
jobs. Over half of the U.S. workforce is now in information-
based jobs. The telecommunications and information sector of the
U.S. economy accounts for more than 12% of the GDP. And it's
growing faster than any other sector of our economy.

What about dollars?

Last year total sector revenues exceeded $700 billion. And
we exported over $48 billion of telecommunications equipment
alone.

When AT&T sold the first cellular phone, they said there
would be 900,000 of them by the year 2000.

Well. We have 13 million now. And it's still 1993. The
predictions for mobile telephone users for the year 2000 now
total 60 million.

This kind of growth will create thousands of jobs in the
communications industry. But the biggest impact may be in other
industrial sectors where those technologies will help American
companies compete better and smarter in the global economy.
Today, more than ever, businesses run on information. A
fast, flexible information network is as essential to
manufacturing as steel and plastic.

Virtually every business and consumer in America will
benefit dramatically from the telecommunications revolution. I
see even Santa Claus is now on the Internet with his own E-Mail.

If we do not move decisively to ensure that America has the
information infrastructure we need every business and consumer in
America will suffer.

What obstacles lie ahead in this rush to the future?
Many of them lie in the system we have created over the last
60 years.

Systems of regulation that made sense when telephones were
one thing and cable another, may just limit competition in a
world in which all information can flow interchangeably over the
same conduits. To understand what new systems we must create,
though, we must first understand how the information marketplace
of the future will operate.

One helpful way is to think of the National Information
Infrastructure as a network of highways -- much like the
Interstates begun in the '50s.

These are highways carrying information rather than people
or goods. And I'm not talking about just one eight-lane
turnpike. I mean a collection of Interstates and feeder roads
made up of different materials in the same way that roads can be
concrete or macadam -- or gravel.

Some highways will be made up of fiber optics. Others will
be built out of coaxial or wireless.

But -- a key point -- they must be and will be two way
roads.

These highways will be wider than today's technology
permits. This is important because a television program contains
more information than a telephone conversation; and because new
uses of video and voice and computers will consist of even more
information moving at even faster speeds. These are the computer
equivalent of wide loads. They need wide roads. And these roads
must go in both directions.

The new information marketplace based on these highways
include four major components:

First, owners of the highways -- because unlike the
interstates, the information highways will be built, paid
for and funded by the private sector;

Second, makers of information appliances, like
televisions, telephones and computers, and new products of
the future that will combine the features of all three;

Third, information providers -- local broadcasters,
digital libraries, information service providers, and
millions of individuals who will have information they want
to share or sell; ...and most important,

At some time in the next decades we'll think about the
information marketplace in terms of these four components. We
won't talk about cable or telephones or cellular or wireless
because there will be free and open competition between everyone
who provides and delivers information.

This Administration intends to create an environment that
stimulates a private system of free-flowing information
conduits.

It will involve a variety of affordable and innovative
appliances and products giving individuals and public
institutions the best possible opportunity to be both information
customers and providers.

Anyone who wants to form a business to deliver information
will have the means of reaching customers. And any person who
wants information will be able to choose among competing
information providers, at reasonable prices.

That's what the future will look like -- say, in ten or
fifteen years. But how do we get from here to there?

This is the key question for the government.

It is during the transition period that the most complexity
exists and that government involvement is the most important.

It's a "phase change" -- like moving from ice to water; Ice
is simple and water is simple, but in the middle of the change
it's mush -- part monopoly, part franchise, part open
competition. We want to manage that transition.

And so I am announcing today that the Administration will
support removal, over time, under appropriate conditions, of
judicial and legislative restrictions on all types of
telecommunications companies: cable, telephone, utilities,
television and satellite.

We will do this through both legislative and administrative
proposals, prepared after extensive consultation with Congress,
industry, public interest and consumer groups, and state and
local governments.

Our goal is not to design the market of the future. It is
to provide the principles that shape that market. And it is to
provide the rules governing this difficult transition to an open
market for information.

We are committed in that transition to protecting the
availability, affordability, and diversity of information and
information technology, as market forces replace regulations and
judicial models that are no longer appropriate.

On January 11, in Los Angeles, I will outline in more detail
the main components of the legislative package we will present.

Today, though, I want to set forth the principles upon which
it will be based.

There are five.

First, encourage private investment.

The example of Samuel Morse is relevant here.
Basically, Morse's telegraph was a federal demonstration
project. Congress funded the first telegraph link between
Washington and Baltimore.

Afterwards, though -- after the first amazing transmission -
-- most nations treated the telegraph and eventually telephone
service as a government enterprise.

That's actually what Morse wanted, too. He suggested that
Congress build a national system. Congress said no. They argued
that he should find private investors. This Morse and other
companies did. And in the view of most historians, that was a
source of competitive advantage for the United States.

We are steering a course between a kind of computer-age
Scylla and Charybdis -- between the shoals of suffocating
regulation on one side, and the rocks of unfettered monopolies on
the other. Both stifle competition and innovation.

The Clinton Administration believes, though, that as with
the telegraph, our role is to encourage the building of the
national information infrastructure by the private sector as
rapidly as possible.

Second, promote and protect competition.

I've talked about highways. All roads once led to Rome.
But how many lead to each home? One, or two, or more? Whatever
the answer, the same principle should apply: we should prevent
unfair cross-subsidies and act to avoid information bottlenecks
that would limit consumer choice, or limit the ability of new
information providers to reach their customers.

We can see aspects of this question in the debate over the
powers of the Regional Bell Operating Companies; in the passage
last year of the Cable Act of 1992; in the proposal to "open up"
the local telephone loop.

Third, provide open access to the network.

Let's say someone has an information service to provide over
the network. They should be able to do it just by paying a fair
and equitable price to the network service provider.

Suppose I want to set up a service that provides 24 hours a
day of David Letterman reruns.

I don't own my own network, so I need to buy access to
someone else's. I should be able to do so by paying the same
rates as my neighbor, who wants to broadcast kick-boxing
matches.

Without provisions for open access, the companies that own
the networks could use their control of the networks to ensure
that their customers only have access to their programming. We
have already seen cases where cable company owners have used
their monopoly control of their networks to exclude programming
that competes with their own. Our legislation will contain
strong safeguards against such behavior.

Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, and head of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, has spoken about the need for the
national information infrastructure to be an "open platform."
The IBM PC is an "open platform" that any software programmer can
use. They can develop software to run on the PC and if they
developed a "killer applications" like Mitch did with Lotus 1-2-3
-- they could make millions of dollars.

In the 1980s, thousands of programmers developed thousands
of different programs, which have increased the productivity of
our businesses, helped our children learn, and helped us balance
our checkbooks.

We need to ensure the NII, just like the PC, is open and
accessible to everyone with a good idea who has a product they
want to sell.

This is essential if we are to have many information sources
on it.

Fourth, we want to avoid creating a society of information
"haves" and "have nots."

You know, the original expression "haves and have nots"
comes from Cervantes.

But we're not tilting at windmills here.

This is the outgrowth of an old American tradition.

Broadcasts, telephones, and public education were all
designed to diminish the gap between haves and have nots.

In the past, universal service meant that local phone
companies were required to provide a minimum level of plain old
telephone service for a minimal price. State and federal
regulations provided for subsidies to customers in poor and rural
areas.

The most important step we can take to ensure universal
service is to adopt policies that result in lower prices for
everyone. The lower the price the less need for subsidies. We
believe the pro-competitive policies we will propose will result
in lower prices and better service to more Americans.

But we'll still need a regulatory safety net to make sure
almost everyone can benefit.

In the past it was relatively simple to fund universal
service. The local phone companies were regulated monopolies
that could be required to provide lifeline services. As more
companies enter the market -- as many of the regulations are
removed -- we have to find new ways of doing the same thing.

Just last week, the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration of the Department of Commerce held a
hearing in New Mexico to examine just that question. Our bill
will incorporate the findings from the hearing and others. It
will reaffirm this Administration's desire to see that all
Americans benefit from the National Information Infrastructure.

As we think about the future of universal service, we as a
society ought to think about what kind of service and on what
group of people we must concentrate.

Schools -- and our children -- are paramount.

The new head of the FCC, Reed Hundt, recently said, "there
are thousands of buildings in this country with millions of
people in them who have no telephones, no cable television and no
reasonable prospect of broadband services. They're called
schools."

When it comes to ensuring universal service, our schools are
the most impoverished institution in society.

Only 14% of our public schools used educational networks in
even one classroom last year. Only 22% possess even one modem.

Video-on-demand will be a great thing. It will be a far
greater thing to demand that our efforts give every child access
to the educational riches we have in such abundance.

The recent article in the Washington Post on the proposed
video communication network in the D.C. area is a wake-up call to
all of us concerned about "electronic redlining." If we allow
the information superhighway to bypass the less fortunate sectors
of our society - even for an interim period -- we will find that
the information rich will get richer while the information poor
get poorer with no guarantee that everyone will be on the network
at some future date.

We cannot relax restrictions from legislation and judicial
decisions without strong commitments and safeguards that there
will be a "public right of way" on the information highway. We
must protect the interests of the public sector.

That's essential in building the information highway.
That's essential in providing affordable services for public
education, public health and government.

The less fortunate sectors of the population must have
access to a minimum level of information services through
subsidies or other forms of a public interest tithe.

Fifth and finally: we want to encourage flexibility.

After all, flexibility and adaptability are essential if we
are to develop policies that will stand the test of time.
Technology is advancing so rapidly, the structure of the industry
is changing so quickly, that we must have policies broad enough
to accommodate change.

Even though the Communications Act of 1934 could not
anticipate many of the technological changes of the last 60
years, it was flexible enough to allow the FCC, state regulators
and the successive administrations to deal with those changes
without rewriting the act every few years.

As the Administration develops its legislation we are trying
hard to follow the example se by the authors of the 1934 Act. We
are trying hard to enunciate key principles of policy, identify
which government agencies will implement that policy, and then
leave many of the details to them.

I don't want to sound like I've thought all these ideas up.
The fact is, in Congress, several important pieces of legislation
have already been introduced.

I've already mentioned the Brooks-Dingell bill in the House.
It, and the Markey-Fields bill represent major steps forward, not
to mention more than a year of hard work by other Congressmen
including Congressman Boucher and Congressman Oxley.

In the Senate, Senators Danforth and Inouye have introduced
a major piece of legislation. Senator Hollings is working on
another.

Between now and the beginning of the next session, we'll be
continuing our dialogue with Congress, industry and public
interest groups to formulate our proposal for legislative and
administrative action that will clear the way for the
communications marketplace of the future. And part of that
effort will be to continue to publicly enunciate what we want and
how we will achieve it.

With high-level Congressional support, a growing consensus
in industry, and leadership from the President, we have a unique
opportunity. We can eliminate many of the regulatory barriers on
the information highway -- and perform the most major surgery on
the Communications Act since it was enacted in 1934.

We will do it by avoiding both extremes: regulation for
regulation's sake, and the blind adherence to the dead hand of a
free market economist. We will do it with the principle that has
guided so much of the Administration's efforts over the last
year: the urgent need to create flexible, responsive government.

It's fitting that this address is being delivered here at
the National Press Club. Almost every form of communication is
present here, in this room. I'm talking to you orally. Some of
you are taking notes -- others are typing on laptops. Some of
you will publish your observations through the use of printing
presses, others though television or radio reports. People tuned
into C-Span are watching on television. Still others are
listening over a prototype of the NII -- the Internet.

All of these forms of communication bring us together --
they allow us to participate in a virtually instantaneous
dialogue. They will allow us to debate, and then to build a
consensus, on the nature of the information infrastructure, on
the details of legislation, on the nature of regulation.

But, even more, as I said at the outset, these methods of
communication allow us to build a society that is healthier, more
prosperous, and better educated. They will allow us to
strengthen the bonds of community and to build new "information
communities."

The challenge is not, in the end, the new technology. It is
holding true to our basic principles. Whether our tools were the
quill pens that wrote and then signed the Declaration of
Independence or the laptop computers being used to write the
constitutions of newly-freed countries . . . better communication
has almost always led to greater freedom and greater economic
growth.

That is our challenge. That is what this Administration--
and the nation -- will achieve.

There's a story about Michael Faraday, the inventor of the
electric generator. Once he was showing Benjamin Disraeli
through his lab, taking great pleasure in demonstrating the
effects he could produce. And at the end of the tour, Disraeli
said, "Well, what good are all these things?"

Faraday answered, "What good is a baby?"

If we take the narrow view, it looks like telecommunications
is well out of its infancy. But if we cast our eyes ahead a few
decades -- or centuries -- we see that it's barely out of
diapers. We need to look ahead, to protect it when it needs
protecting, but not get in the way when it needs to walk alone.

Like those wireless operators should have done in the North
Atlantic, we should be alert to where the collisions could be.
And we shouldn't hesitate to chart a new course.

If we do that, then much more than the telecommunications
industry will grow strong. This country and much of the human
race will, as well.